Zhou Enlai
Communist China's durable premier for its entire first quarter-century, Mao's chief diplomat and administrator, remembered as the pragmatist who kept the state running.
For the entire first quarter-century of Communist China, one man kept the government running while the man above him repeatedly tried to remake it by force. Zhou Enlai served as premier of the People's Republic from its founding in 1949 until his death in 1976, and as foreign minister for the first nine of those years. Urbane, tireless, and famously charming, he was the administrator and diplomat who translated Mao Zedong's revolution into a working state, and who survived at the top longer than almost anyone around him.
The indispensable number two
Zhou came from a declining gentry family, studied in Japan and France, and joined the Communist Party in his twenties. He had helped lead the Party through the Long March, and at the 1935 Zunyi conference he threw his weight behind Mao, a bet that shaped the rest of his career. What made him durable afterward was not ideological purity but usefulness. Through decades of purges that destroyed rivals, Zhou positioned himself as the loyal manager Mao could not do without, the man who ran the ministries, balanced the accounts, and smoothed over crises. Critics then and since have called it survival by submission; admirers call it the pragmatism that kept the machinery of a vast country turning through repeated upheaval.
Diplomat to the world
Abroad, Zhou was China's public face. He led China's delegation at the 1954 Geneva Conference on Korea and Indochina, his debut on the world stage, and at the 1955 Bandung Conference of newly independent Asian and African states he presented a reasonable, conciliatory China and championed the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. His largest achievement came later. Working through secret channels, he arranged Henry Kissinger's covert 1971 trip to Beijing and then President Richard Nixon's landmark visit in February 1972, which produced the Shanghai Communiqué, realigned the Cold War, and ended China's long isolation from the West.
Ambiguity and aftermath
His conduct during the Cultural Revolution remains the hardest thing to judge. Zhou used his position to shield some officials, intellectuals, and cultural treasures from the Red Guards, and many Chinese still remember him gratefully for it. But he also kept the system running and rarely challenged Mao directly, which meant enabling the very campaign whose worst effects he softened. Diagnosed with cancer and increasingly sidelined by the radical Gang of Four, he died on January 8, 1976. The grief was enormous, and it turned political: that April, crowds who gathered in Tiananmen Square to mourn him were dispersed as counterrevolutionaries, an incident that exposed the public's contempt for the radicals and foreshadowed the collapse of the Maoist era only months later. Zhou had spent his life making an unstable revolution look governable; even the mourning at his death did that work one last time.